“I’ve had to move into a rental in a scary part of town — there goes my down payment for the next house.”

“Well, at least my parents haven’t done anything with my old room.”

These are all from stories I’ve heard on the local, Bay Area grapevine. Anecdotal accounts, it’s true. But I’d hazard a guess, from the current state of the real estate market, that plenty of other recent home sellers are having the same trouble.

They couldn’t afford to buy a second house before selling the first one — banks aren’t exactly sympathetic to carrying two loans these days. But after the sale is done, they have nowhere to go. Inventory is low, and in this part of the country, multiple offers are becoming normal again — at tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars over the list price. (Remember when the market felt so slumped that it could never unslump? Weird.)

The only silver lining to the low inventory is that buyers are often so grateful to be in contract to buy a home that they’ll bend over backwards to accommodate sellers’ needs to stay a little longer, an arrangement outlined in Nolo’s Q&A, “What happens if we’ve sold our old house without buying a new one?” But even the most sympathetic seller isn’t going to want to wait around forever.

About Ilona Bray

The blog is written by Ilona Bray, a Nolo editor and co-author of Nolo's Essential Guide to Buying Your First Home. Ilona Bray is a former attorney, now author and editor at Nolo. She has co-authored many popular Nolo real estate titles, including Selling a House in a Tough Market and First-Time Landlord. In her spare time, she enjoys walking the hidden paths in her neighborhood and visiting weekend open houses.